On the road

The Volvo XC60 tests the depths of your inadequacy Photograph: James Royall

If you've ever had a demanding lover, you'll know what it's like to drive the new Volvo XC60. If it could talk, the XC60 would say, in a snooty voice: "Not like that. Faster! Slower! Don't put your fingers there! Oh you're useless, let me do it!" It's like Rowan Pelling, with a chunkier rear end, functioning airbags and GPS as standard.

As I join the Valencia rush hour, lights are flashing and beeps beeping all over the car. I'm doing everything wrong. The driver-side wing mirror light tells me there is a car in my blind spot. A red light reflected on to the windscreen indicates the car thinks I'm too close to the vehicle ahead. The beeping has been activated because the car thinks I am poised to plunge over a Spanish precipice.

I'm not up to driving this car. There's no handbrake! No ignition key! There is (this is insane) a remote control for the GPS that your smartarse kids in the back can use to countermand your programming. Then there's the adaptive cruise control which has been explained to me three times, but I still don't understand.

This isn't Volvo's fault. I am an inadequate driver. The last time I owned a car was a year ago. My partner found herself in the street, daughter in one arm, shopping in the other, and a space where our motor should have been. "It'll cost you £250 to get it back," said the not-unpleasant car pound functionary. The car was worth £50, so we didn't bother. Now they're letting me drive a crossover 4x4 worth at least £25,000. Fools!

Bruce Springsteen's Born To Run comes unbidden over the stereo. The soundtrack is laughably inappropriate. While Asbury Park's highways are surely filled with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive, Valencia's boulevards today teem with thin-soled motoring correspondents test-driving the safest Volvo yet manufactured. We roll in brown and green hues to a nice lunch in the hills. Male car-junket veterans complain that Volvo's nannying motoring philosophy is anathema: they got into this game to treat the car as they dream of treating their women. They don't want to drive her sensibly to a tapas-based buffet according to Swedish safety parameters, but slap her around the hairpins. The XC60 won't stand for such nonsense. The Valencia air is thick with auto-sexual frustration.

XC60's USP, the City Safety, is what Volvo's engineers yearn to tell us about. If you're nose-to-tailing it in heavy traffic at speeds of up to 30kph and you drift off into your thoughts (how nice it would be to have a Victoria sponge for tea), failing to brake before hitting the car ahead, the City Safety will brake for you. We test this facility in a playground. Egbert Bakker, the Dutchman in charge of Vehicle Dynamics, challenges me not to brake as I accelerate towards an inflatable simulacrum of a car. I accept. The car stops itself just short of collision. Per-Ola Fuxin, Volvo's City Safety expert, tells me this feature has been responsible for up to 30% insurance premium reductions in Germany and Sweden.

Volvo, I learn, envisages an accident-free future in which cars will communicate with each other, rendering drivers all but redundant. The XC60, then, isn't so much a car as a stage on the highway to transhumanism. Ultimately, the main problem with the XC60 is me. This Volvo would do better if I vacated the driver's seat and allowed it to sort itself out. So I do. The feeling of relief, no doubt, is mutual.